Because of my love of the HBO show OZ, about a year ago a friend recommended I check out the Wire which has a lot of the same cast. Over the last year I watched the entire series right up to the final episode ever that came out a few weeks ago. (Speaking of the last season of the Wire, I shot the after party to the season 5 premiere.) It was sad to see the end. I was talking about this to a friend and he recommended I check out The Corner which was a mini-series on HBO that was based on a book of the same name which eventually spun off into the Wire. The writer of the book, David Simon, was also the man responsible for Homicide back in the day. I used to watch that show and since it was filmed in Baltimore I have met tons of people in my life who have appeared as extras and such. I grew up in DC, and Baltimore is about an hour away and I have spent a lot of time there. The Corner and the Wire are also based on Baltimore which is probably one of the reasons I did the show so much.
Okay, let’s get back to the point of this post. The Corner like I said was based on a book. That book as a work of non fiction. The Corner the mini-series is fictionalized, but it is based on actual people. At the end of the series they interview some of them. The heroin addict mother on the show I recognized from a cameo she had in the Wire so I googled her. Her name is Fran Boyd. What I found when I looked her up was this amazing article in the New York Times about her recent marriage to a man named Donnie Andrews.
Donnie Andrews was the basis for the drug dealer murdering anti-hero on the Wire, Omar. Omar is by far my favorite character on the show, and probably everyone’s favorite character. I was shocked to learn he was based on a real person, a real person who was serving a life sentence for murder… That is until David Simon introduced him to Fran Boyd.
“They had a hunch Mr. Andrews, who was turning his life around by earning a general equivalency diploma, taking college-level courses and studying the Bible, could influence the life of Ms. Boyd, who was still nodding out in the old neighborhood. They gave Mr. Andrews her phone number.”
Mr. Andrews, also a former heroin user, understood her struggle and her pain. His first wife was murdered three years after he went to prison. He began calling Ms. Boyd frequently. Their conversations were sometimes “four and five hours long,†he said. After a $2,900 phone bill, limits were set on their calls. He used less expensive communication, too, sometimes writing three or four letters a week.
After Boyd and Andrews began talking, Andrews helped Boyd quit drugs forever and Boyd did everything she could to get Andrews paroled. After calls and letters and even convincing the DA who prosecuted Andrews to testify at his parole hearing he was released after 17 years. Andrews has turned his life around and now works security at a church and works in anti-gang outreach programs in Baltimore. Fran has been sober for many years and works in outreach programs for drug addicts. And in August of last year they were married.
I could not imagine a happier ending to a story that could have ended so badly for both of them. At the end of the Corner they tell you what happened to the people on the show since the book was written. They were not good stories. This one is, and it just goes to show you can never write people off.
